Re: Device address specific mapping of arm,mmu-500

[Marc Zyngier <marc.zyngier@arm.com>]

On 30/05/17 17:49, Ray Jui wrote:
> Hi Will,
> 
> On 5/30/17 8:14 AM, Will Deacon wrote:
>> On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 06:18:45PM -0700, Ray Jui wrote:
>>> I'm writing to check with you to see if the latest arm-smmu.c driver in
>>> v4.12-rc Linux for smmu-500 can support mapping that is only specific to
>>> a particular physical address range while leave the rest still to be
>>> handled by the client device. I believe this can already be supported by
>>> the device tree binding of the generic IOMMU framework; however, it is
>>> not clear to me whether or not the arm-smmu.c driver can support it.
>>>
>>> To give you some background information:
>>>
>>> We have a SoC that has PCIe root complex that has a build-in logic block
>>> to forward MSI writes to ARM GICv3 ITS. Unfortunately, this logic block
>>> has a HW bug that causes the MSI writes not parsed properly and can
>>> potentially corrupt data in the internal FIFO. A workaround is to have
>>> ARM MMU-500 takes care of all inbound transactions. I found that is
>>> working after hooking up our PCIe root complex to MMU-500; however, even
>>> with this optimized arm-smmu driver in v4.12, I'm still seeing a
>>> significant Ethernet throughput drop in both the TX and RX directions.
>>> The throughput drop is very significant at around 50% (but is already
>>> much improved compared to other prior kernel versions at 70~90%).
>>
>> Did Robin's experiments help at all with this?
>>
>> http://www.linux-arm.org/git?p=linux-rm.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/iommu/perf
>>
> 
> It looks like these are new optimizations that have not yet been merged
> in v4.12? I'm going to give it a try.
> 
>>> One alternative is to only use MMU-500 for MSI writes towards
>>> GITS_TRANSLATER register in the GICv3, i.e., if I can define a specific
>>> region of physical address that I want MMU-500 to act on and leave the
>>> rest of inbound transactions to be handled directly by our PCIe
>>> controller, it can potentially work around the HW bug we have and at the
>>> same time achieve optimal throughput.
>>
>> I don't think you can bypass the SMMU for MSIs unless you give them their
>> own StreamIDs, which is likely to break things horribly in the kernel. You
>> could try to create an identity mapping, but you'll still have the
>> translation overhead and you'd probably end up having to supply your own DMA
>> ops to manage the address space. I'm assuming that you need to prevent the
>> physical address of the ITS from being allocated as an IOVA?
> 
> Will, is that a HW limitation that the SMMU cannot be used, only for MSI
> writes, in which case, the physical address range is very specific in
> our ASIC that falls in the device memory region (e.g., below 0x80000000)?
> 
> In fact, what I need in this case is a static mapping from IOMMU on the
> physical address of the GITS_TRANSLATER of the GICv3 ITS, which is the
> address that MSI writes go to. This is to bypass the MSI forwarding
> logic in our PCIe controller. At the same time, I can leave the rest of
> inbound transactions to be handled by our PCIe controller without going
> through the MMU.

How is that going to work for DMA? I imagine your network interfaces do
have to access memory, don't they? How can the transactions be
terminated in the PCIe controller?

Thanks,

	M.
-- 
Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny...